Easy Tomato Sauce

I love to can.  I love putting away food for my family that, for the most part, is free.  Pretty much all we buy are the seeds for the plants.  There is the time factor but The Doctor loves outside work so, I let him have fun in the garden.

My family also uses a lot of tomato sauce.  From spaghetti, to pizza, to chili and soups, and, and and.... we go through A LOT!  The fist time I made sauce it was full of seeds and runny... I hated it.  So I went on a quest to find and easier way to make sauce.  After reading many blogs and searching Pinterest, I found 2 ways that looked perfect for me.

So, Monday I decided to do something about all the tomatoes that we picked over the past week.


First I put them in my steamer juicer.  I love this gadget.  It has made juicing grapes and all manner of fruit easy.  I filled it to the top and turned the stove on.  In the end I had 1 1/2 gallons of juice.  You can see the the juice had a bit more color to it toward the end.  This I will freeze to use in vegetable soup instead of water.

Before

After

Then I put the tomatoes from the steamer into a strainer and let them drain a little more.

The last thing I did that day, was to put them in my Kitchen Aid Vegetable Strainer.  I love this as much as I love my steamer juicer.  I just put the tomatoes in  and out comes tomato pulp on one side and seeds and skins on the other.  It is a tad messy, but most of my canning is.

Here you can see that I got 1/2 gallon of tomato meat.  I will cook this down a bit more and put it in jars.

I did mention that there were 2 methods that I wanted to try. The second was to puree your tomatoes first and then put it all in a clear container and set in your fridge overnight.  What you will have in the morning is all the tomato pulp floating on top and juice on the bottom.  You can then skim the pulp off the top and process as normal.  I did this with my jar and had a scant amount of juice on the bottom.  I then warmed up the sauce and canned it.

I want to add here that I love my 1/2 gallon jars.  They are perfect for storing all my dry goods in.

After I cleaned up my kitchen and started dinner, The Dr and I went out to the garden and brought this in.........  Good thing I didn't put everything away!!

Lydia inspecting the tomatoes